TL;DR: The lighttpd webservice for https://tools.wmflabs.org/dplbot/ fails repeatedly, frequently, and unpredictably, and I have been unable to diagnose any cause.

Currently, tools.dplbot is running a php7.2 webservice on the kubernetes backend; however, the failures started occurring when it was running lighttpd on the job grid, and the move to kubernetes does not seem to have changed anything in this respect. The tool serves a variety of PHP-based pages which generate reports from the Toolforge database replicas.

The symptom of failure is that all requests get rejected with 503 service unavailable. The lighttpd process continues to run (which is why I am calling this a "failure" rather than a "crash"), which means kubernetes doesn't detect any problem and doesn't restart the server, but the server does not respond to any requests. The "webservice status" command claims that the webservice is still running. Every time this happens, I have to restart the webservice. The webservice appears to fail immediately after some restarts, while in other cases it runs normally for a period of time, which is highly variable (minutes to hours) and then fails again.

Even more frustrating than the constant failures is the lack of any information to allow diagnosing the cause of this. The error.log file (/data/project/dplbot/error.log) does not show any error messages corresponding to the times of failures. I tried various lighttpd debugging options, and none of these gave me anything useful. They appear to show all requests being handled normally, and no debug information at all at or or after the point of failure. I also reactivated access logging (/data/project/dplbot/access.log), and this only shows requests that were handled correctly. In other words, there is no log indicating a request that came in at/just before a failure without a corresponding response going out.

If these failures were being caused spontaneously by some problem in lighttpd or in the Toolforge infrastructure, I would expect other users to be affected by them, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

This has previously been reported at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115231 (including more detail on the debug options I tried), where frankly I have received absolutely no assistance. I did receive one mildly helpful comment from bd808 on a related issue (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T218915), as follows:

However, if there is an internal deadlock or resource exhaustion issue in the underlying PHP scripts, I would expect some error message in the logs, which isn't there. Also, during a recent interval when the server was up for a while, I took the time to click every single link on https://tools.wmflabs.org/dplbot/, and the server responded to every one of them, so there does not seem to be a fatal bug in any of the scripts (although this exercise revealed a few minor issues).

I'm not necessarily looking for someone to solve this problem for me (although that would be nice :-) ), but just some ideas about how to identify potential causes. Right now it is basically a black hole; no information whatsoever is coming out of the webserver at the point of failure, so I can make no progress.